I've been seing an odd problem with my pcmcia NIC since I installed Slack. It starts out working fine, dhcp assigns and IP nice and quick and everything works fine.

At some point, after a boot up or two, the NIC stops getting an IP from dhcp when I boot up and my dsl modem/router resets itself. I know it isn't any sort of hardware problem because I don't see it using another *nix such as Gentoo or Mepis LiveCD.

Something to do with the net config or dhcp is changing but I can't seem to determine what it is or what causes it. I've reinstalled Slack three times now as it seems to be the only way to fix the problem. I refuse to reinstall again as it's just stupid to keep having to do that.

Someone must have an idea what's causing this weird behavior or at least where to start looking for it. I've checked the net related config files and rc.d files but don't see anything obvious.

Any ideas?

OK, here's what I have discovered on this so far.

If I delete the files /etc/dhcpc/dhcpcd-eth0.cache dhcpcd-eth0.info dhcpcd-eth0.old chcpcd.eth0.pid
and restart pcmcia service it connects fine.

I also see that resolv.conf is empty. SHouldn't dhcp write the info to resolv.conf?

I dual boot with Fedora Core. Fedora Core picks up my NIC and configures my DSL modem fine, but I don't think it closes the connection. So, if I reboot into Slackware it work fine.

Frustrating to have to do this to get online with Slack.

The deleting files that you mentioned, do you have to delete these same files every time you shutdown Slack so that you can get online the next time you boot?

I have a similar problem. Slackware 10.1 sees my nic just fine. I set a static ip on it. I can send maybe 30 packets before it drops the connection altogether. I cant ping any machines on the network and all tcp functions are useless. I reboot the box, I get a connection for a bit and than it just loses connection again. Nothing in messages or any other log file I can look through. I have no idea why its happening.

Have figured some of it out. The connection problem only happend when i shut down or reboot teh machine. Connection is fine when I shut down. next time I start the machine it can't connect until I delete the cache and info files. The pid was a fluke, it's usually not there when inactive.

For some reason, the dhcpcd isn't releasing the lease upon shut down as near as I can tell so the only way to restart the connection is to stop pcmcia, delete the cache and info files in /etc/dhcpc and then restart pcmcia. What a pain.